Proactive and Dynamic Slice Allocation in Sliced 5G Core Networks

Malicious co-residency in virtualized networks poses a real threat. The next-generation mobile networks heavily rely on virtualized infrastructure, and network slicing has emerged as a key enabler to support different virtualized services and applications in the 5G network. However, allocating network slices efficiently while providing a minimum guaranteed level of service, as well as providing defense against the threat of malicious co-residency in a mobile core network, is challenging. To address these questions, in our previous work, we proposed an optimization model to allocate slices. It provided a static and manual allocation of slices. In this work, we analyze the defense against the malicious co-residency using our optimization-based allocation, and we extend our work to dynamically allocate slices. We propose a dynamic slice allocation framework for the 5G core network. The proposed framework provides user-interaction to request slices and any required services that need to run on a slice(s). It can accept a single or multiple allocation requests, and it dynamically allocates them. Additionally, the framework allocates slices in a balanced fashion across available resources. We compare our framework with the First Come First Serve and First Available allocation scheme.